Bodies on the Gears

Five lecture performances

Curated by Tom Sellar

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part…. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”
– Mario Savio, Berkeley, 1964

Artists have been critical agitators in the current movements for social, economic, and political justice—from Occupy to Tahir Square, the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, and beyond. Their creative interventions have shifted public perceptions of conflicts at pipelines, national borders, and more locally, at museums and cultural institutions.

For this 2019 Discourse series, co-presented with the Yale journal Theater, American Realness invites five writers and artists to reflect on relationships between creative practice and political agency—especially when it comes to live forms.

Bodies are vulnerable subjects under siege today: Black and brown bodies. Women’s bodies. Queer bodies. Migratory and indigenous bodies. Disabled bodies. Muslim bodies. Bodies make movements when they form a protest; bodies also make movements in dance. Do these actions converge?

How can choreographies, theater, and visual culture shape and carry—not just augment—ideas of protest? Can performance and other spaces for live encounters awaken and catalyze and renew—or are our institutions aesthetic tombs, permanently dead to the possibility? Could live arts hold special potential as public assemblies, as rigorously imagined convenings of micro-utopias? What can expressive projections of past and future contribute to the movements of the present? Fresh vocabularies, imagery, or other elements? What examples should we keep in mind?

The five lecture-performances are co-commissioned by Theater magazine, a creative journal published by Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre and Duke University Press. The original texts will be published in the Fall 2019 edition (www.theatermagazine.org).